Nov 19, 2016

Development Snapshot 14

Snapshot 14 (S14) is officially done.

As part of my attempt to get my project back on track I decided to limit the scope of each snapshot. In the past I'd planned for 6-8 week development cyles, which (due to lack of discipline) wound up overrunning and being more like 12+ weeks. This time round I tried to restrict myself to just 2 weeks. I ran into some unexpected hurdles that pushed that time out a bit, but S14 came in at just over 3 weeks. Hurrah!

What did I achieve in Snapshot 14?

About half the time was spent on refactoring and improving existing code. I've learnt a great deal about writing better code in the last year, and there's plenty of poorly thought out design in my codebase. This is a legacy of the fact that I'm a much better developer now than when I started the project 6 years ago.

I made good on my promise to start building parts of the system which are essential for the game to be releasable. Eg: the ability for the player to die.

(work in progress)

Starvation and Dehydration are now actual threats in the game. The way it works is as follows: Living creatures have health, food and water stats. Creatures will be able to consume food or drink that will instantly affect their food or water levels, but health can only be regenerated naturally.

The player's health, water and food display

While alive, creatures consume food and water. These rates are dependant on factors such as the activity level of the creature and the ambient temperature. Once the creature runs out of one of the resources, the amount consumed (plus a penalty) is instead taken from the creature's health.

I'm still tuning the rate at which it occurs, but for a player at full health its something like 2 days without water or 5 days without food before death occurs. Obviously if you're already injured and you're out of both food and water it's going to be considerably shorter.

I'm hoping to make the game less about combat and more about other interactions, such as exploration, negotiation, stealth etc. Since you can't instantly regenerate health, the way players approach combat will need to be more tactical. eg: Taking an enemy by surprise and knowing when to retreat. In addition, NPC's will be less likely to resort to deadly violence unless desperate as they value their lives and the lives of their families.

What's in store for Snapshot 15?

Next I'm going to expand the eating and drinking system to include food and water borne illnesses, such as eating uncooked meat or drinking contaminated water. Also on the agenda will be the ability to save and load the game. Most of the code is already in place to serialise and deserialise the gamestate, however its not being persisted to disk yet.

It's not a huge amount of effort, which is probably why I've put it off, but its essential for Release Ready status. As previously stated my plan is to drag the game up to a point where I can start making test builds publicly available. Its quite a way off, but at least I'm now heading in that direction!